The company behind a planned Queensland kaolin mine has announced successful results from independent concrete trials using its AusPozz high-reactivity metakaolin product.
Zeotech said independent testing confirmed that AusPozz delivered significant gains in concrete strength and other performance improvements, alongside its decarbonisation benefits.
About 200 tonnes of high-purity kaolin feedstock from the Toondoon project in Queensland has been delivered to Melbourne in preparation for a commercial-scale production run of AusPozz.
The trial is scheduled in April, involving potential customers in the building materials and construction industries.
Zeotech chief executive officer James Marsh said independent test results demonstrated that AusPozz could be a gamechanger in the race to decarbonise concrete, contributing to sustainability in the built environment.
“The test work indicates that AusPozz offers a much more significant concrete carbon reduction than expected and a host of potential performance benefits across a wide range of high-volume concrete applications,” he said.
“Our simple and low-cost process flowsheet will make AusPozz a low-carbon, economical product, eliminating the key barriers to market entry and allowing broad customer uptake.”
Highlights from testing:
- Results demonstrate that AusPozz can replace up to 40 per cent of general purpose (GP) cement and limestone-type (GL) cement binder in concrete and improve product performance.
- Concrete strength gain of about 50 per cent achieved with AusPozz when used to replace 20 per cent of GL cement.
- AusPozz enhances concrete performance, enabling a significant reduction in total cement binder, thereby accelerating a lower total embodied carbon for concrete.
- AusPozz can significantly reduce concrete shrinkage compared to GP cement and GL cement controls, which is a desirable technical and commercial advantage.
- AusPozz can replace silica fume in concrete, supporting significant cost reductions and handling improvements.
- When used in optimised designs for large volume concrete applications such as wind farms and deep foundation pilings, AusPozz can eliminate the challenging issue of heat differential.
Zeotech has completed a desktop assessment of the carbon footprint of AusPozz based on a proposed manufacturing facility located at the Port of Bundaberg to support prefeasibility study workstreams.
This preliminary assessment has determined a carbon footprint of about 200kg per tonne of AusPozz, compared to the Australian average of 951kg per tonne of GP cement, or 79 per cent less embodied carbon.
